1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to the field of smart cards and more particularly to the field of devices used in conjunction with smart cards to increase the usefulness of electronic cards, including smart cards, to users.
2. Description of Related Art
A Smart Card is a plastic card with an embedded microchip that allows its owner to use the Smart Card as a substitute for cash in purchasing a wide variety of goods and services. Smart Cards are well known and have enjoyed wide commercial success, particularly in Europe and Australia. The innovation of the smart Card is that it can be programmed to store a numerical value equaling a prepayment in cash by its owner and to deduct expenditures from the monetary value until the value is expended. Thus, the Smart Card provides the convenience of a credit card, but does not require pre-qualification as to credit history, income, or the like. At any one time, a "Smart" Card can store a value of any monetary amount.
A further advantage of the Smart Card is that it eliminates the need to verify the owner or the credit status and compliance of the user. It is simply used until the prepaid funds are expended, or until cash is again pre-paid to allow its owner to use once again as a cash alternative. The Smart Card microchip simply subtracts the cost of the financial transactions until a zero balance is shown. Then the owner pre-pays a new amount, and the Card is activated again. A Smart Card is typically activated by a personal PIN number to protect the owner from theft; thus, the Smart Card is of no value to anyone except the owner, who possesses the PIN number.
A further characteristic of the Smart Card is that, as with cash transactions, no individual record of types of purchase is identified, allowing for the privacy of one's own transactions. Thus, the Smart Card provides the privacy of cash, but the safety and convenience of credit cards. In some countries, such as France, the Smart Card is a cash alternative for a wide range of goods and services, including telephone calls, highway tolls, retail store purchases, restaurant charges and taxicab charges.
The enhanced privacy of the Smart Card is not without certain disadvantages. In particular, by nature of its intended purpose, the Smart Card does not provide for the availability of paper receipts, monthly statements or any other typical form of tracking or tallying financial transactions, such as in the case of credit card transactions. This necessary limitation leaves a critical gap in what has come to be a standard expectancy of consumers, who, in their history of using common and widely-used purchasing mediums (credit cards, personal checks, ATM cards, etc.), have come to rely on the generation of accounting records of transactions by the entity that provides the purchasing medium. Thus, a need has arisen for a device that can offer users of the Smart Card or other microchip-embedded electronic cards the multiple conveniences of complete user privacy, ongoing tracking and tallying of purchases, and user-directed accounting in their financial transactions.